Meetings With Remarkable Magicians

I recently had the pleasure of working with an act about whom I have being hearing great things for many years. The act was ventriloquist Mike Robinson, and if anything his performance was even better than his word of mouth (maybe a strange expression to use about a ventriloquist—but then the lips saying it all moved!) led me to believe. He was funny, funny, funny.

Combined with the original and expertly delivered comedy Mike delivered in his show, was a technique as good as any ventriloquist I have ever seen, right up there with my previous frontrunner Jay Johnson. Robinson is an act that any performing ventriloquist needs to see, in order to improve their workplace skills.

Included in Mike’s performance was a short segment that involved a really basic card routine that he set up for his sidekick Terence delivered the punchline. Now don’t be fooled by my use of the word basic, there was absolutely nothing basic about his casually expert handling of the cards or the ‘laugh a second’ dialogue. I have always been fascinated by how many magicians began their careers as ventriloquists and vice versa, I suspected that Mike belonged to this group and I was right.

I had the opportunity to spend some time with Mike I realized that he not only fitted this category of hobby dialecticism but that he belonged to the much rarer group of individuals who possessed the dedication to master both art forms. Put quite simply, Robinson is one of the very finest sleight of hand magicians I have ever seen perform.

Mike is ‘Jack of two trades and master of both,’ however don’t expect to see him working in the close-up gallery at the Castle anytime soon. He is way too busy; making far to much money with his ventriloquism to give the experts at the Castle the treat his booking would deliver.

Seconds, bottoms, multiple shifts, doubles and every form of gambling maneuver flow from his fingertips with the same ease that original comedy escapes from his alarmingly motionless lips! When we first sat down with cigars and a deck of cards I quickly exhausted my rather rusty card work and just sat back to enjoy the thrill of watching an expert strut his stuff!

Born in Montreal and now a native of Halifax, Canada, Mike learned his first card trick when he was 6 years old and continued his magical education on a daily basis watching the magician on the ‘Uncle Bobby’ kid’s television show. He soon became an avid junior magician, but all this changed when he saw a guest appearance on the Flip Wilson Show by one of the greatest ventriloquist to still grace our stages. That act was the iconic ‘Willie Tyler & Lester.”

The young Mike Robinson was amazed at the illusion of ‘voice-throwing’ that Willie demonstrated. He was also delighted and could empathize watching the talented African American performer and his pint sixed colleague with the stylish and hip ‘Afro’ hairstyle! Mike was mentally reborn as a ventriloquist…………

Magic was shelved (or more actually, sidetracked) for a career in ventriloquism that has made him one of the busiest performers on the scene. However, his drive and quest for perfection kept him working at some of the toughest moves and challenges to face any card worker. His success in both fields makes him unique.

Mike began his serious study of magic watching the late, great ‘Charming Cheat’ Martin Nash on the Magic Palace TV show. He was instantly hooked on the gambling effects that Martin featured in his performance, “That is when the light bulb went off,” as Mike puts it. Richard Turner’s VHS tapes and personal guidance from Turner helped steer his work on the path to becoming a top card worker.

Robinson met Turner at a ‘4F’ convention, and Mike still attends the yearly convention inspired by the great Eddie Fechter. He also performs a handful of highly select sleight-of-hand dates for high priced hospitality suite events. If you have a chance to see Robinson work—DON’T MISS IT! If he is performing his ventriloquism show then corner him afterwards and offer him a cigar and a deck of cards—he can’t resist either one. You won’t be sorry.

I asked Mike to give some advice for young magicians who will read this column, I loved (and totally endorse) his response, “Go back and read the original literature, there are a lot of tricks out there on the Internet, but first develop your personality and then really study the classics. The first 4 Ace trick is probably still the best,” these are words of wisdom from a master performer.

Posted in Magic and Magicians
Tags: Martin Nash, Mike Robinson, Richard Turner, Ventriloquism

Enough with the Grammy talk already. The music industry may act for an evening like a family, but for the other 364 days in the year it’s a powerfully dysfunctional one.

Let’s weep about Whitney for a night, however, the rest of the year we embrace the pressures, expectations and greed that enable talented rockheads like Whitney to die at 48. While our sister industry TV gives a reality show to the asshole/enabler husband who helped create this pathetic train wreck that everyone is shocked died after she spent so much time, energy and money trying to destroy herself.

This is an industry that takes raw talent, chews it up, spits it out and then wrings its hands when thae talent self destructs. The real heart and soul of Whitney’s label were already checking the vaults to find rejected material to convert into a ‘best of the rest’ album, even before they were putting on sad faces and expressions of shock at the inevitable news. They did that with Amy Winehouse, and couldn’t wait to release an inferior album while the news was hot.

The entertainment industry sure does a good job of mounting the bullshit sentimental tributes to it’s money makers though. Oh wait—that’s their job.

Posted in Entertainment News
Tags: Grammys's 2012, Whitney Houston

As anyone who has been around the comedy world for anytime at all knows, there is one question that keeps getting raised  repeatedly. In fact, it has become something of a Philosophers Stone of comedy material the world over. well I am delighted to say that I can now definitively give the answer.

What is more unlike similar enigmas ie The Loch Ness Monster, Big Foot, Flying Saucers etc. I can also provide photographic evidence on the matter. I suspect the answer will rock the comedy world to it’s core with it’s bold simplicity.

The heart and soul of routine in nearly every hack comedian (and one or two, not quite so hack, comedians) act, is about that missing sock that always seems to appear (disappear?) when one does the laundry. 4 go in and 3 come out, or 2 go in and 1 comes out. Provocative observational humor from the cutting edge of daily experience. Well, I have solved the problem, and the came about quickly and unexpectedly—fortunately my iPhone 4s was at hand.

While packing up our house in Las Vegas ready for our move to Los Angeles, we donated our washing machine to a charity and then moved our dryer into the moving van AND there it was, under the dryer—–the sock! I suggest other comic entertainers check in the same location to confirm the universal truth of my discovery. I was truly shocked by the solution to this seemingly insolvable quandry that has purplexed some of comedy’s greatest (and not so greatest) minds.

Emboldened by my discovery, I know plan to start work on tracking down the reasoning behind the 12 hot dogs in a package and 10 buns in a package conundrum that now remains as comedy’s second greatest equivelent to cold fusion. Rest assured that I will report my findings, when or if I get them, in these digital pages.

Let This blog entry also act as an advisory of our relocation from Las Vegas to our LA home, prior to our nextmove to Austin, Texas, ‘cos that’s where we wanna’ live—right under the X in Texas. My email adresses and cell phone number remain the same though.

Posted in Magic and Magicians
Tags: Comedy enigma solved

This is a reprint of a colunn I wrote in 2008 about the Tony Giorgio. As you can tell I was a great fan. He sent me a wonderfully eloquent response and told me I had it SO right with my description of his relationship with Dai Vernon. I got another email from him at a later point telling me how much he looked forward to my little columns in Magic New Zealand, it was an honor and joy for me to hear this. He said he especially loved the columns about the Magic Castle in the 70s and how many happy memories he had of those times when (as he put it) I loved the Castle and the Castle loved me. Well, Tony–the Castle never stopped loving you neither has any  single magician who knew you. I like so many others am proud to have got to know you a even a little bit. You will be sorely missed by the real magicians.

One of the great delights that I enjoyed during the seventies in the Magic Castle was watching the interplay between Dai Vernon and Tony Giorgio. The appearance of confrontation that sometimes seemed to exist between the two was just that. An appearance. On a closer look it became very apparent that there was a bond of respect and friendship that linked these two very different characters. Tony would tease Dai and draw him out to reach deeper and deeper into his professorial bag of sleights and tricks.

If as Robert Houdin famously said, “A magician is an actor playing the part of a magician.” Tony Giorgio is the perfect man to prove the point. Tony is one of that special breed of actors who is recognized by the vast majority of people who chance to meet him. He has been featured in more movies and television shows than I could even list in my column without Alan having forty fits.

Tony was the perfect hood and villain throughout his acting career and to my mind made his greatest impact in ‘The Godfather’ ‘Foxy Brown ’and ‘Magnum Force’. To put it mildly he is a very imposing movie presence. To be absolutely honest he was also pretty damn imposing when you saw him perform his brilliant sleight of hand and gambling ‘cons’ in the Castle’s Close-Up Gallery.

I never missed a chance to watch him work his wonders. He was an amazing character with a full force talent that was second to none. Mind you he never quite abandoned his movie tough guy persona and I for one would never have dared to find the ‘broad’ he was tossing just in case he really was packing heat!

I remember one evening I was standing in the back of the Close-Up Gallery enjoying the show. My hand was resting behind the back of the chair next to me. Ronnie Berg was occupying that particular chair and at one point he threw his entire weight against the rear of the chair and it resulted in the most unbelievable pain I had ever experienced. I screamed out at the top of my lungs causing more than a little excitement and confusion in the tiny room. Everyone turned around and stared at me. Highly embarrassing.

My eyes eventually met Tony’s eyes and he was looking at me in a rather bemused manner. He politely enquired if he could continue with the show. I nodded and made a vague gesture towards my throbbing hand, the gesture failed to really indicate anything at all but the show began again.

No sooner had the show started when Ronnie Berg whispered an apology to me and then said; “ I can fix it for you, I am really good at setting bones.” He then took my injured hand and gave it a hefty squeeze. This resulted in another lusty scream from yours truly and once again the show ground to a halt. Even more embarrassing and trust me if there was ever a show you wanted to avoid bringing to a grinding halt it was Giorgio’s show.

There was another, very unexpected, side to Tony that I was delighted to discover several years later. Aside from his other skills and talents he is one of the worlds greatest authorities and performers in the truly occult area of ‘Griffter Poetry.’ I listened in fascination as he recited nearly lost odes to a lifestyle and era that has all but disappeared. It was a glimpse into world I scarcely knew existed.

A man of many parts, a jack of several trades and master of any that took his fancy, there aren’t many people who don’t fade into insignificant next to Tony Giorgio. He is one of the richest and most unique threads in the tapestry of the performing arts and a very unique addition to my list of Remarkable Magicians.

Posted in Entertainment News, Magic, Magic and Magicians
Tags: Dai Vernon, Tony Giorgio

I took the opportunity to revisit ‘Vegas Magic Theater’ this weekend and see what was happening at Paul Stone’s latest production in Las Vegas. It was also a chance to see an extended version of Jason Andrews fine manipulative act which actually got me to budget my crazy schedule to include the visit. I was very glad I did.

I (totally by accident) attended the Press Night event for the show recently. I am really no big fan of press nights or the way they introduce a show. The emphasis on the press corps, food & drink and celebrities in the audience often change the flavor and ‘shape’ of the actual show. I certainly found my second visit to the ‘Vegas Magic Theatre’ to be a much more rewarding affair.

We missed the opening close-up segment, which featured a ‘Dueling Magicians’ segment that seemed to be a huge hit. Given the success of the current breed of dueling pianists across the country this is a smart move. The very nature of the idea breathes fresh life into the concept of adding the close-up magic segment to the show.

Another nice surprise was to see headliner Kevin James open the bill with a really great, intimate, low key and VERY effective set. In the comedy club world this is often referred to as a ‘Boston Bill.’ In the city of Boston, shows would usually open with the headliner hitting the crowd hard, before, introducing the rest of the show and then returning as the finale. It worked great.

Kevin is a complex and gifted magical thinker and a great performer too. I personally thoroughly enjoyed watching him perform a scaled down set without any entourage or additional personnel involved. Kevin may just have returned from headlining a show at the Sydney Opera House, where I’m sure he featured many of his gloriously off-kilter and eccentric illusions, but this was ‘Kevin James: Unplugged!’ It really highlighted a very likeable, touching and vulnerable side to Kevin that was highly effective and extremely commercial. Kevin can achieve enormous results with just his ‘presence’ and a few small props, and did so with great aplomb and success. I will look forward to seeing what Kevin has cooked up for the new magic show at the Plaza Hotel ‘Avant Garde.’   I thoroughly enjoyed both his sets and they created a fabulous bookend effect to the evening.

Ben Stone continued to impress as the host of the show. His singing adds a lot of texture and some nice razzle dazzle to the show. He has a great voice and a lot of charm energy and onstage charisma. Oh, my wife took me for task last time I reviewed the show for not commenting how handsome he was! That is a comment I’d probably never, ever have have thought to make, however, sitting flanked by two ladies (Susan and the irrepressible Karla Kwist from the Mac King showroom) I realized that this was indeed the case and that it was a huge plus point to the females watching the show!

Aside from singing, Ben performed an excellent comedy sleight of hand routine featuring cards that worked very nicely indeed. The first time I saw him hosting the show his comedy magic was featured after another comedy magic act and suffered by the balance that this created in the show. On this occasion, veteran performer Tom Ogden appeared later in the bill and it was his turn to suffer from the similarities that always (myself, included) can follow from two comedy magicians appearing in the same bill for a lay audience.

A verbal and a physical comedy magic show, in the same bill, might be a better balance in a comedy club format show such as this one. A good variety performer also makes a strong addition to the event. I am sure this is something that Paul will adjust accordingly as he continues his fine-tuning of the show.

 Just returned from work in China and Japan, Jason Andrews was a superb highlight in the center of the show. He performed his classic award winning manipulative show and it resonates with style, class and personality and drew very heavy audience response. It was great to see him add a new final segment to his show.  This is not a performer who is going to be lost in the world of 8-minute acts for long!

I have seen Jason perform his illusions and also his comedy magic show and they are both as effective as his award winning silent act. I hope the magic community will allow him to fully develop into the role of fully rounded performer. He has future magical superstar written all over him. Several times during the evening I heard him referred to as the next Lance Burton and that sells him short—we already have one Lance, but a fully developed Jason Andrews is going to create a stir all his own.

To my mind, Jason could best be categorized (Yikes, I hate to ever do this, but I will) as the next Fred Kaps. Fred was a manipulative performer who developed and progressed into arguably magic’s most sophisticated all round performer. I will continue watching Jason’s ascendancy in the magic world with great interest. Catch his act now and enjoy watching him develop.A great evening, great acts and all the performers out onstage for a final bow—the professional way to close a variety show! Kudos to Paul Stone for his part in exposing Las Vegas to some new talent and old favorites, keep it up!

Posted in Magic, Magic and Magicians
Tags: Ben Stone, Jason Andrews, Kevin James, Vegas Magic Theatre

When I began booking shows things seemed a lot different. To begin with I was about 14 years old and my target shows were children’s parties. It has been a long time since I booked a kid’s show, but believe me I would do it again tomorrow if the price and location were right.

I suspect the majority of paying shows in the magic community are still kid’s shows. Magic has always been largely considered an entertainment for children. Even casinos and cruise ships, two other major markets for magicians, are really just playgrounds for adults with disposable income, they only occasionally where silly paper hats though.

The general rule of thumb when I was booking those early dates in my career was to run a short classified advert in the local paper and then bedazzle the potential client when they phoned you in response to it. You usually had a glossy brochure that you could mail them to ‘seal the deal.’ I suspect this approach still does work rather nicely if you replace the brochure with a promotional video of some kind and throw a website into the mix.

Back in the 60s, when I was booking these kind of dates the second line of attack was less proactive but even more effective—you did the very best show you could, priced it carefully and then waited for word of mouth to increase your workload with more dates. It was simple and seemed to work very well.

Being a magician and raised on stories of Houdini, and his great publicity stunts, you probably also dreamed and strove to emulate his success by engineering some kind of publicity stunt to make your name better known through that curious beast known as ‘exposure.’ If you could pull of some great feat, which got your name mentioned in the local newspaper for free—then the bookings would flood in. Right. Hmmmm.

Eventually if you wanted to expand your source of work you entered the scary world of agents. These were mysterious beings that seem to offer access to more clients, but at the cost of removing your personal access to the actual individuals who wrote the checks. Not only were you suspicious of the process but first you also had to find one!

This step tended to stop a lot of performers who somehow felt that the agent was a person who actually somehow stood in the way of you getting the gig. It didn’t matter if you never even knew the booking existed. The main reason for this mistrust was because the agent represented several clients and one of their other acts might be more suitable and get the gig instead of you. That is the trade-off, if you don’t like it tough—go back to the classified ads.

The important part about working with a legitimate agent is to realize that this variety of clients and performers is what they bring to the table. It’s how they earn their rather modest fee. They really don’t care who gets the gig (unlike you, the performer involved) but they do have a very vested interest in making sure that the gig works out for the buyer. The client, make no mistake, is the booker who writes the check for the gig. If it is a success then that buyer might become a client for the agent.

Of course you don’t need an agent to work, but he doesn’t need you either, so let me pass on four simple guidelines that help when dealing with an agent.

1 He/She is not ‘the enemy’ or a necessary evil, he is part of the route you need to become a more highly paid and fully booked performer. I hear many ‘somewhat professional’ performers rant about agents, when maybe they should look at their own acts and ethics more closely.

2 To steal a client from an agent is immoral, incorrect and foolish. If he gets a new buyer to purchase your services—then he deserves his percentage of any future booking made from his booking. Take a bunch of his/her cards to the gig and hand them out—not your own.

3 Do not expect an agent to care as much about you as he does himself or his revenue inducing contacts. Why should he? You work for the agent and not him for you. This isn’t Broadway Danny Rose. Get real and stay there!

4 Give him the best publicity material you can and don’t promise more than you can deliver. The first act will help you get the gig and the second action will screw it up if you do get the gig. Always remember you may lose that agent a long-term client and a steady source of income by a foolish promise or boast.

I’m going to stop here, if you follow these basic steps you are already streets ahead of most of those strange creatures that describe themselves in the non-reality term ‘semi-pros…’

Posted in Magic, Magic and Magicians
Tags: Agents for magicians, Booking a magic show, Performing Comedy Magic for big bucks

This is a blog entry that shouldn’t need to be written so obviously I am going to do it anyhow! I am often amazed at how little class magicians show the audience members who assist them during their show. While this isn’t a gigantic epidemic, it is really ugly when it arises.

Every now and then you see a magician treat an audience member in a dismissive manner that really borders on insulting. Let’s put this in perspective, I consider giving them insufficient instructions about what they are supposed to be doing onstage is definitely high on this list. It ain’t right.

When someone is removed from their seat in the cozy dark of the audience and thrust into the brightly lit stage environment they need to be paid attention to. You don’t need to handle them with kid gloves but you should certainly have the courtesy to look at them and talk to them and not use them as unpaid props.

The confusion that can result from dropping the assistant unexpectedly in the middle of things and allowing very natural tentativeness and their lack of awareness of what’s going to happen and what their role is supposed to be, should not be used to garner a single solitary laugh. Act classy and the crowd will assume (even if totally mistakenly) that you are classy—- it’s money in the bank to a smart performer actually.

You shouldn’t bully an asistant by repeatedly harassing them about whether the ball is under the cup or in your pocket. The damn thing is a Chop Cup and the ball is where ever you want it to be! Are they there as a genuine representative of the audience or as a butt for laughter from the rest of the audience—who are just delighted it isn’t them up there!

If ever there was a moment to clear out any hack lines from your presentation it is when they are directed at an audience volunteer. You may not believe this but as recently as this month I heard someone deliver the old, “Give me your hand, no the clean one! Oh that was the clean one!” I will add, “Give me your left hand, no, your other left hand,” to this outdated and ‘can’t discard fast enough’ list.

Let your assistant get a laugh or two of their own, with a little bit of thought you can create a moment or two where this is likely to happen. Often your assistant will genuinely say something that is funny—-and which you can quietly make funnier with your take on the line. When this happens, make a point of selling it to the audience. Take the time to at least pretend to crack up (no-matter how many times you may have heard the response before) and say jokingly say something like, “I love it when the audience is funnier than I am!”

Having said all the above, I must be honest and admit that watching Amazing Johnathan ignore/decimate/ridicule/deride and generally bully his onstage dollar bill donor is one of my primal joys in comedy magic! However, AJ is a force of nature and has the ability to re-write any laws of good taste that apply to other performers. He is also one of the most genuinely likeable comedian magicians working today. That is why it works.

If you want laughs in your act then do something funny or write a good joke, don’t pick on somebody who is unprepared for what is going to happen; while you have the situation pre-planned and pre-set jokes galore. Look at the big picture and be funny and classy—think about the way Michael Finney involves (a very carefully chosen word there—involves) his onstage assistant during his classic rope routine.

While mentioning Michael, I want to congratulate him on the 6-month contract he just signed to appear in the new show ‘Avant Garde’ at the newly re-gentrified Plaza Hotel in downtown Las Vegas. His run begins in February and if you have the chance to catch him then DO SO. You can forget everything I’ve written here and just go watch someone who has done it right for so long that it is second nature!

Email me at nicklewin1@mac.com    

Posted in Entertainment News, Magic, Magic and Magicians
Tags: audience members, Michael Finney, Performance of Magic, Performing Comedy Magic for big bucks

The devastating speed and totality of the sinking of the luxury cruise ship Concordia recently was a shock to many of us who spend a lot of time onboard large cruise ships. It was really only a matter of time before something like this happened but the mind puts these things aside. The recent media on this disaster quickly puts it on the front burner.

It is still to early to sort out a definitive view of what happened that night, but nothing about it is very reassuring. As a veteran who has been working on cruise ships, on and off, since the early seventies I am aware that safety is no small concern with the companies who own and operate these ‘floating cities.’ However, at the very least it has made me realize how cavalier I (and many other entertainers) have become about important little details such as actually knowing exactly where our lifeboats are, let alone actually attending the passenger boat drills that our highly desirable passenger stature demand.

To passengers in general the boat drill is seen as something of a routine formality. Hmmmmm, I guess not. The fact that the Concordia sank so close to land saved many, many lives I suspect. Obviously you have to wonder why it was so very close to land that it happened, especially on a route it covered every week. The chaos that has been described is worrying, to say the least. The magician onboard elledgedly seems to have left his assistant stuck inside a Zig-Zag illusion! I won’t say what I think about that until I hear definitively if it is true or not.  If it is true then shame on him.

However, when disaster strikes, rational thought can jump out the window–or porthole. As a matter of fact, so can rational actions; what good is it rushing to your lifeboat station on the port side of the ship if that side of the ship is raised at a 45 degree angle and the lifeboats won’t lower? This seems to have been the case. What is needed is a very clear understanding of the layout of the vessel and a clear understanding of the situation that is unfolding. The first is easy to undertake and master, the second is a little tougher and more difficult if things are confused, chaotic and you are literally and figuratively in the dark.

What needs to be kept in mind is that if a situation such as this occurs it isn’t a case of ‘every man for himself’ but of ‘everyman THINK for himself’ and then try and improve the knowledge and plans of those around you. Those of us who live, work and make money on cruise ships have an added responsibility (aside from the natural, understandable basic role of saving ourselves) to try and be aware in contributing to the best possible dissemination of sensible information to those less conditioned to the geography of ships than ourselves.

Am I worried that I am sailing away again the day after tomorrow on a cruise ship? No. I am convinced that the majority of cruise ships are meticulously prepared for most emergencies—-God forbid they happen though. It might not occur within swimming distance of the coastline. It might not be as clear cut situation as emergency training drills tend to present when they are held. Let’s use this terrible example as a guideline to raise each of our personal levels of preparedness. I became an entertainer on a ship to make people laugh, I would feel pretty bad if, in an emergency, I couldn’t use my superior shipboard knowledge to save a life (as well, as my own) by doing so.

This is awake-up call. Let’s make sure it wakes us up a little………..     

Posted in Entertainment News
Tags: Concordia disaster, cruise ship performing

Many of the greatest characters I have met in the magic world were not the celebrities or the famous magicians. In fact sometimes it can be downright disappointing how ordinary the big name folks can be.

One of the blessings in our strange universe is some of the peripheral players who enrich the daily life of the performing magician. Some of them don’t even perform much magic, but make up for it by being audience members of the highest order.

One of the great meeting spots, or should I say watering holes, of this special breed of magic aficionados used to be Friday lunch at the Magic Castle. It was always a joyful exchange of gossip and good will and there were also the amazing beef ribs that were served exclusively on these occasions.

Two of my very favorite people used to attend these luncheons in the ‘70s with a regularity that made the workings of Big Ben seem erratic. These two characters were Stan Gray and Stanley Blumenthal and they were a splendid pair of jokers to add to the Castle’s deck of magicians.

Stanley was a cigar salesman by trade and the most enthusiastic supporter of magic you could ever find. If you were performing a gig in some local club or dive, chances are that Stanley would turn up (and pay his admission-no freeloader was Stanley) and be right there in the audience with a big smile on his face. He would laugh heartily at all the right places as if he had never heard the joke before.

The only piece of magic I ever saw Stanley perform was a curious bit of business where he removed the wrapper from a cigar and then stretched it out until it resembled a gigantic condom. If it sounds strange believe me it was! The little gizmos he used to achieve this result had something to do (I believe) with the casings used to manufacture sausages. I have about a dozen of these little gimmicks left that Stanley gave me and I keep them in a beautiful wooden cigar box he gave me too. I treasure them.

Stan Gray was a character of different sort and as brash as the day is long, but he shared the enthusiasm of his namesake when it came to his appreciation of the magical arts. Stan was a tour bus driver for the Gray Line- no family connection sadly! He used to entertain his tourists with a trick or two during their sight seeing tours of California.

Stan always said he did it because he made more money in tips but he never fooled me. Stan couldn’t resist a captive audience and a chance to entertain them. There was nothing that Stan could do to support magic that he didn’t do. Nothing was too much trouble if he thought that it would help out a fellow magician.

Now, I realize that neither one of these two gentlemen will be too familiar to most of my readers but they are the heart and the soul of what magic should be all about. Both have long since passed away but in this strange and quirky memoir of magic that I seem to be writing they both deserve a special mention and tip of the hat. If you did know either of them then I am sure you will recall them with a fond smile. If you didn’t know them you will just have to take my word for it that they were as deeply entwined in the fabric of magic as Shimada and Copperfield,

Posted in Magic, Magic and Magicians
Tags: Stan Gray, Stanley Blumenthal